imagination, gently drew to the casement, and got into my bed, as I should have done an hour, perhaps, before. But I found there no refuge from the silence that should be broke, but was not. And this sense of loneliness brought me in mind of the forgotten duty of prayer, so that I was quickly again out of my bed and on my knees by its side, hoping, childlike, great solace to my oppression of spirit. And then it came,--not the solace, but the breaking of the silence. And, though it was not such as I had looked for, being but the slight click of a pebble upon the glass of my window, yet did it send, as they say, my heart into my throat, and my whole body was a-tremble, as it had been a harpstring overstrained. It is a thing for which I can never to the day of my death sufficiently thank the goodness of God, that my terror took from me the voice in which I would have cried aloud upon the house. And so I gasped for breath, and clutched the clothes of the bed in a fear quite out of reason; and had I been upon my feet instead of my knees, 't is sure I could not have kept them. And then I heard the jingle of a bridle and the thud of an impatient hoof falling soft upon the sod, so that even in my passion of fear I knew it was under my window, or I had not heard it, for the grass was soft with the rain that fell at sunset. Upon that strange thoughts of our bugbear Kirke and of those devils that he ruled crept in my mind; but surely, I thought, my father's good affections to the throne should protect us; and, some movement of curiosity stirring in my breast to combat its army of terrors, I made shift to creep with knees and hands to the window, whence, with caution raising myself and peering through the lower panes, I espied dimly the shape of a man standing beside his horse. Thereupon, perchance having seen the whiteness of face, hand, or sleeve at the window, though the light was almost none, the man below uttered that whimsical little whistle of three notes that was a signal and warning of childhood to me, and I knew it was Ned. And my joy was so great that I forgot the hour, the place, the strangeness in him to come to my chamber window, and the unseemliness of my attire. Indeed I thought but of him as I gently flung back the casement, and cried, but softly: "Ned, dear Ned, is it indeed thou?" Whereupon he replied, in a voice, as I thought, strangely altered from that I had known (but indeed it was but the day's anxiety and alarms that had so changed its sound): "I indeed it is, dear Mistress Phil. But, I pray you, speak low and secretly, for I do think they will be even now upon me." "And who are 'they'?" I asked, lightly enough, having as yet no fear that any would harm such as he.